Guilds are a self-organizing group of people with common interests. It is a natural forum for social interactions that build relationships which promote cooperation, cohesion, and productivity. Guilds provide a horizontal communication layer across our Technology teams on a wide variety of topics.
Our analysts, engineers, managers, and other staff use them to learn, share, grow, and to promote education through experiential learning. This collective action benefits the guild members, their craft, and our organization. These guilds help create a platform where folks can collaborate & orchestrate groups that want to sync more regularly on more specific topics. While these guilds originated within the technology organization, they are open to anyone at SPS.
There are a few simple but essential rules for guilds…
- First and foremost, guilds are inclusive! Anyone can and everyone is encouraged to join or start any number of guilds.
- Guilds are easily discovered
- Wiki - All guilds must be added to the wiki Guilds wiki page with a description, organizer, link to wiki pages (if they exist), and Slack channel
- Slack channel – Guild Slack channel must start with “guild.”
- If the guild meets regularly, the internally public Tech community calendar should be invited to give anyone interested a chance to attend.
- Slack channels are active such that questions are responded to. (Even if the answer is “we don’t know”)
Guilds at SPS have only been around for around three years but already 21 different guilds have spun up around many different topics. These are UI, Board Games (MPLS and Toronto), Breakfast Club (Intro to programming), DotNet Core, Agile, Kubernetes, Open Source, CI/CD, Film Club, Role playing Games, Coding Practice, Java, PC Builders, Cloud, Windows Server, Monitoring and Observability, Lollipop Guild (book club), Security, GraphQL, and Data Science
Of these 21 guilds at SPS, 14 are currently active and one is in the middle of re-organizing. While six have gone inactive, the notes and names of folks involved are still searchable for questions.
Guilds have provided a way for our teams to get to know each other while exploring common interests, share a few laughs, and learn something new together, and we are always happy to see a new interest group spin up.
CI/CD Guild
PC Builders Guild
